What it tells us

Insight identifies issues about the quality and safety of care, but we don't use this on its own to make judgements. We can only reach judgements about the quality of care after we've carried out an inspection.

We inspect all new services. Then we focus follow-up inspections on those where our insight suggests risk is greatest or quality is improving. We will update ratings where we find changes. We use unannounced inspections to focus on areas where our insight suggests risk is greatest.

By targeting our inspections in this way, we will recognise improvement and identify and act on poor care.

We compare the information we collect across England to help us pinpoint differences from national averages or agreed national standards. The action we take depends on what kind of variation we've identified - we might inspect or we may contact the service to find out more.